by Kevin Burton
I don’t regret having read the backs of so many baseball cards so much as a youth, but I do wish I had mixed in a few more of the better works of literature.
Today we get some of what I missed out on, from a list compiled by Merriam-Webster dictionary of words that came from characters in books. We start with my favorite of the bunch:
Quixotic: idealistic and utterly impractical; especially : marked by rash lofty romantic ideas or chivalrous action doomed to fail
“The novel Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes (published in 1605 and 1615), is widely regarded as one of the greatest works of literature ever. It also has given us a small, but useful, batch of words and phrases for describing that special kind of person who is unencumbered by common sense and the notion that grand gestures are often impractical.”
“The name of the hero of this work, Don Quixote, is used as a term for an impractical idealist. Used without the honorific Don, quixote by itself also refers to a quixotic person. And most common of all is that adjective, quixotic, used to refer to a person who is always ‘tilting at windmills’ (a phrase denoting fighting imagined or illusory foes, taken from a scene in the book where Quixote attacks a windmill, thinking it a giant).”
Yahoo :an uncouth or rowdy person
“Yahoo comes to the English language from the fertile imagination of Jonathan Swift, author of the famed Gulliver’s Travels (as well as the somewhat less-remembered Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue).”
“In Gulliver’s Travels the Yahoos were an imaginary humanoid race, brutish and uncouth. This book was also responsible for introducing the words Lilliputian and Brobdingnagian.”
Pooh-bah: 1 : one holding many public or private offices
2 a : one in high position
b : one who gives the impression of being a person of importance
“Readers of a certain age might be excused for thinking that the pooh-bah comes from the cartoon series The Flintstones. That show occasionally featured a ‘grand poobah’, who was a high-ranking member of a secret society. However, the roots of pooh-bah extend far beyond Saturday morning cartoons.”
“It originated in the Gilbert and Sullivan 1885 comic opera, The Mikado. The character of that name finds himself in possession of a wide variety of positions and offices, and is dubbed Lord-High-Everything-Else.”
Pander: someone who caters to and often exploits the weaknesses of others
“Pander has undergone a bit of what linguists and other wordy types like to call “pejoration,” the process by which a word’s meaning and connotation goes downhill.”
“The initial meaning in English was in reference to someone who acted as a go-between for a pair of lovers, a facilitator of romance. The word entered our language in this sense as an alteration for the name of a character (Pandare) in Chaucer’s classic poem Troilus and Criseyde; Pandare assisted the lovers in this poem in their romance. However, soon after the word began to take on slightly…less noble shades.”
“Pander began to be used as a term for a pimp, or a person who procured the services of a prostitute. After this it broadened to include any person who helped satisfy any one of a number of questionable urges.”
Gargantuan: of tremendous size or volume
“Gargantuan comes from the title character of the 1535 satire by Rabelais, Gargantua.”
“In this work, Gargantua is a giant with a ravening appetite (eating, for instance, six pilgrims in a salad). The name appears to have been first converted into an adjective in 1596, by Thomas Nash, who wrote:
‘But when I came to unrip and unbumbast this Gargantuan bag-pudding, and found nothing in it, but dog-tripes, swine-livers, oxe galls, and sheepes guts, I was in a bitterer chafe than anie Cooke at a long Sermon when his meate burnes.’”
Serendipity: an assumed gift for finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for
“Serendipity was the creation of Horace Walpole, the famed 18th-century English writer, who is known both for authorship of the first Gothic novel in English (The Castle of Otranto) and for having a lifelong obsession with writing letters (more than a thousand of which were to Horace Mann).”
“In one of these letters to Mann he explained that he came up with the word serendipity and based it on the fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip (Serendip was formerly the name for Ceylon). The protagonists of this tale were in the habit of making happy discoveries, quite by accident.”
Tomorrow: more words birthed by great literature.
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